Re: monstrousness, this is something that has never left me:
In the 70s my mum worked with severely disabled children, and in the course of her training she was in one particular institution of the locked ward type. The actual, official term used for the human beings in there was "monstrosities". They were just people who had very severe disabilities and [language edit - I think disfigurements is a term now used more than what I used earlier - I apologise if I hurt anyone through not thinking about that more], but even knowing what I know about disability history and the long road from unrelenting hiding and shaming of people... I feel that there is a level on which this way of thinking about people has never left us. I hesitated to even bring it up because it's a profoundly upsetting thing, but what you said chimed so much with my mother's story, and I think helps to explain it.
Nowadays we're in a euphemistic phase as regards how society relates to disabled people (and look at me, with my use of language, passively reinforcing the idea that "disabled people" are not a subset of "society"!), and to people who are different in other ways. It seems related to the racism issues around "colourblindness" - if I don't see difference, or claim not to, then I can claim it doesn't affect my thinking about others; that I'm not prejudiced. Likewise, if I don't use words that are clearly dehumanising and hurtful, I can claim that I'm not treating disabled people as a separate, sub-human class - even if my actions and attitudes reinforce that Othering.
As to the human/animal scale, it explains a lot for me. I remember that at the time when things had reached a particularly depressing plateau in the fight against the Welfare Reform Bill, the fight against the badger cull was mobilising, and they'd had a particularly massive response to the call for signatures on the government petition. I hate the idea of a hierarchy of causes - caring about one thing doesn't mean you don't care about others, and many people will have signed both that and Pat's Petition, which we were then working hard to grow. But it honestly felt as if the average person was more moved by the death of a badger than by the death of one of us, and I was very bitter about it at the time.
Re: Some early-morning, highly caffinated, thoughts
In the 70s my mum worked with severely disabled children, and in the course of her training she was in one particular institution of the locked ward type. The actual, official term used for the human beings in there was "monstrosities". They were just people who had very severe disabilities and [language edit - I think disfigurements is a term now used more than what I used earlier - I apologise if I hurt anyone through not thinking about that more], but even knowing what I know about disability history and the long road from unrelenting hiding and shaming of people... I feel that there is a level on which this way of thinking about people has never left us. I hesitated to even bring it up because it's a profoundly upsetting thing, but what you said chimed so much with my mother's story, and I think helps to explain it.
Nowadays we're in a euphemistic phase as regards how society relates to disabled people (and look at me, with my use of language, passively reinforcing the idea that "disabled people" are not a subset of "society"!), and to people who are different in other ways. It seems related to the racism issues around "colourblindness" - if I don't see difference, or claim not to, then I can claim it doesn't affect my thinking about others; that I'm not prejudiced. Likewise, if I don't use words that are clearly dehumanising and hurtful, I can claim that I'm not treating disabled people as a separate, sub-human class - even if my actions and attitudes reinforce that Othering.
As to the human/animal scale, it explains a lot for me. I remember that at the time when things had reached a particularly depressing plateau in the fight against the Welfare Reform Bill, the fight against the badger cull was mobilising, and they'd had a particularly massive response to the call for signatures on the government petition. I hate the idea of a hierarchy of causes - caring about one thing doesn't mean you don't care about others, and many people will have signed both that and Pat's Petition, which we were then working hard to grow. But it honestly felt as if the average person was more moved by the death of a badger than by the death of one of us, and I was very bitter about it at the time.